The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (Ken Robinson)
Contains a lot of stories about exceptionally individuals who go off the beaten tracks and followed their hearts to achieve their goals. Really interesting read. Also, a very good analysis of what it means to be in the zone, getting into the whirlpool of creativiy and to be one in your own element. He also pointed out the importance of finding your own tribe in order to be stimulated further to raise the bar in whatever we are trying to do. One thing to note is, life is full of unexpected twists and turns. We never know who can inspire us or what trodding down an unbeaten track means but the key is to never be afraid to explore or try new things. For sure, if we are afraid to fail, we will always be afraid to try.
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extracts from the book.....
In the 1960s, an unknown student at Cornell University threw a plat into the air in the university restaurant. We don't know what happened after that to the student or to the plate.The student may have caught the plate with a smile, or it may have shattered on the floor. Either way, this would not have been an extraordinary event but for the fact that someone extraordinary happened to be watching it.
Richard Feynman was an American physicist, and one of the undisputed geniuses of the twentieth century. He was famous for his groundbreaking work in several fields including quantum electrodynamics and nanotechnology. He was also one of the most colorful and admired scientists of his generation, a juggler, a painter, a prankster, and an exuberant jazz musician with a particular passion for playing the bongos. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Phyics. He says this was partly because of the flying plate.
"That afternoon while I was eating lunch, some kid threw up a plate in the cafeteria," Feynman said. "There was a blue medallion on the plate, the Cornell sign, and as he threw up the plate and it came down, the blue thing went around and it seemed to me that the blue thing went around faster than the wobble, and I wondered what the relation was between the two. I was just playing, no importance at all, but I played around with the equations of motion of rotating things, and I found our that if the wobble is small the blue thing goes around twice as fast as the wobble goes round."
Feynman jotted some thoughts down on a napkin, and after lunch, he got on with his dya at the university. Some time later, he looked again at the napkin and carried on playing with the ideas he'd sketched out on it.
"I started to play with this rotation, and the rotation led me to a similar problem of the rotation of the spin of an electron according to Dirac's equation and that just led me back into quantum electrodynamics, which was the problem I had been working on. I kept continuing now to play with it in the relaxed fashion I had originally done and it was just like taking the cork out of a bottle -- everything just poured out, and in very short order I worked the things out for which I later won the Nobel Prize." (pg 69-70)
Creative work also often involves tapping into various talents at your disposal to make something original. Sir Ridley Scott is an award-winning director with such blockbuster films as Gladiator, Blade Runner, Alien, and Thelma and Louise to his credit. His films have a look distinct from other film directors. The source of this look is his training as an artist.
"Because of my background in fine art," he told me, "I have very specific ideas about making films. I've always been told I have this eye. I've never though about what it is, but I'm usually accused of being too pretty, or too beautiful, or too this, or too that. I've gradually realised that this is an advantage. My first film, The Duellists, was criticized for being too beautiful. One critic complained about the 'overuse of filters.' Actually, there were no filters used. The 'filters' were fifty-nine days of pissing rain. I think what he was taken by was how I look at the French landscape. Probably the best photographers of the Napoleonic period would be painters. So I looked at the Russian painters of Napoleon going to the front on that disastrous journey to Russia. A lot of great nineteenth-century views on that are frankly just photographic. I would take everything from those and apply that to the film. (pg 72-73)
Fame and financial reward accompanied Ewa Laurance on her rise to the top. But for her, the biggest charge continued to be the game itself.
"You're almost unconscious to what's going on around you. It's literlaly the most peculiar feeling. It's like being in a tunnel but you don't see anything else. You just see what you're doing. Time changes. Somebody could ask you how long you've been doing it and you could have said twenty minutes but it was actually nine hours. I just don't know. I have never had it with anything before or since, even though I am very passionate about a lot of other things. But the feeling of playing billiards is very unique for me.
"Part of the beauty that pool offers you is how much you learn. It's a never-ending deal. Every layout is different, so there's always something to keep you interested. I just love the physics and the geometry of it -- learning and understanding the angles and finding out how far you can push to change the angle to get the cue ball where you want it to go. And learning what the limits and possibilities are. Being able to control the cue ball scooting forward two and a half inches instead of three is a pretty amazing feeling. So instead of fighting the elements, you actually figure out a way to work with them.
"I wasn't at all interested or good at geometry or phyics at school. But for some reason, when I'm playing I see it a lot. I look at the table and I literally see lines and diagrams all over the place. I see 'I'm going to make the 1 here, the 2 over here, the 3's going to go down here. I'm going to have to go three rails around for the 4, the 6 is down here, no problem. I've got 7,8,9, I'm out.' I see them all lined up. And then if you hit one ball a little bit incorrectly, all of a sudden a whole new diagram in your head pops up. You need to resolve the problem because you're not where you wanted to be . You were six inches off, so now you have to reformulate the whole thing.
"Geometry at school did not get my attention. Maybe if I'd had a different teacher it would have been different -- somebody that just said, 'Ewa, think of it this way,' or, 'Look at it this way and you will get it.' Or they could have taken our whole class to a poolroom and said, 'Check this out!' But it was so boring at school. I couldn't keep my eyes open in class, you know? But now, when I give lessons to someone, I try to figure out as quickly as I can if they have hand-eye coordination and also, are they just interested in the game or aret ehy interested in the geometry and the physics of it. Are they math-oriented."
Ewa has been playing billiards professionally for nearly thirty years. Yet she still gets the same charge that the sport has alwys given her. "Even when I do an exhibition, after all these years, I get nervous. People say, 'Well you've done it so many times.' But it doesn't matter; it's about being in that moment."
Playing billiards puts Ewa Laurance in the zone. And being in the zone puts Ewa Laurance face to the face with the Element. (pg 85-86)
Finding your tribe offers more than validation and interaction, important as both of those are. It provides inspiration and provocation to raise the bar on your own achievements. In every domain, members of a passionate community tend to drive each other to explore the real intent of their talents. Sometimes, the boost comes not from close collaboration but from the influence of others in the field, whether contemporaries or predecessors, whether directly associated with one's particular domain or associated only marginally. As Isaac Newton famously said, "If I saw further it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants." Thiis is not just a phenomenon of science. (pg 118)